The artist Jack White called “the great grandfather of all American and Western music”
While best known for his guitar and vocal styling as part of the iconic indie rock duo The White Stripes, Jack White is a multifaceted man. As an artist, White is credited with helping spur the garage rock revival of the 2000s. As a result of his success, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of our time. But over at Third Man Records, he’s helping to restore history and making it in the process.
In 2001, White founded Third Man Records with Ben Swank of the Soledad Brothers band. While predominantly a record label, the organisation also presses vinyl. That’s how White became connected to the man he considers the “great grandfather of all American and Western music”.
White teamed up with Document Records, which, as he explains, put out “hundreds of blues and folk records over the last few decades”. Detailing further, he continued: “What I’d been noticing since we started Third Man Records and since I’ve been interested in blues music is that all the blues classic songs are not available on vinyl. You had to buy the old pressings of them.”
White explains how blues labels like Document Records went straight to CD and digital, “which is all great because it’s very easily available,” he said. “But they stopped pressing them on vinyl for some reason”. As a keen vinyl collector and huge blues fan, given that his own guitar style is influenced by classic blues rock sounds, White wanted to rectify that.
Third Man’s mission was simple: to press some of these forgotten blues records onto vinyl and “keep them in print as long as Third Man Records is in business” so that they’re never lost again. Picking their favourites out of the hundreds of titles owned by Document Records, White’s first choice was simple: “Charley Patton was the first thing I said. I want to do Charley Patton first, and I want to do the complete works”.
When asked why he was so dedicated to restoring the work of Patton, a blues musician working as early as the 1890s, White said: “He said basically the great grandfather of all American and Western music, in my opinion, that has lasted the test of time.”
According to White, the beginning of all American music was the blues. He said: “That splintered off into so many different things, into country, into rockabilly, into rock and roll and all kinds of popular music nowadays”.
Continuing, he added: “If we’re talking about the early days of the blues and who was generating a lot of these ideas and the chord changes that set up the whole structure, there are people before Charley Patton, but he was the first big name.”
“What makes him important is because of the people that followed him; Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson,” White continues. “They were copying what he was coming up with. They were his disciples that took it out and spread it across the Delta and then onward and upward to Chicago and the rest of the world.”
The man who pioneered the blues style, leading to the lineage of great guitar players that Jack White sits within, he owes it all to Charley Patton.
